> Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters.
This is consistent with my view of how engineers in the traditional disciplines view patents.
> At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla
This is the precise thing that patents are designed to prevent: to keep the market from turning into a race to see who can outsource most efficiently to China and inundate the public most completely with advertising.
> The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.
So the other manufacturers didn't copy Tesla's technology, either because they are incapable of it or because they didn't feel there was enough money in it relative to their traditional markets.
> We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.
In other words, it helps Tesla more to have lots of companies developing electric cars to push back on regulatory barriers and consumer perceptions than it does for them to protect themselves against larger manufacturers copying their technology. Also buried in here is the assumption that Tesla is, now, far enough ahead of its potential competitors that it doesn't matter if they copy the technology.
I think this is the right move for Tesla, but there's a lot of dynamics at play that have nothing to do with the usefulness of patents in general.
I have absolutely no idea how you possibly came to this conclusion.
[1] At least when you're talking about physical products that are sold in one-off transactions for money. If you can leverage network effects or lock-in effects, or hide your innovations behind arms-length protocols, like many internet-based companies do, you're not as vulnerable to copycats.
I think Musk cares more about advancing electric cars than suing and squeeze profits out of patent monopolies.
Patents were largely designed to enable the state to have a selectively published library of what was being invented in the country and to reduce the power of trade guilds, who had huge power at the time. Offering a limited monopoly backed by force of law was one of the few incentives that worked for acquiring access to the kind of trade secrets you needed to keep your edge on the battlefield.
We definitely have government protected monopolies though, no doubt about that. Tons of them in fact. From defense contractors, to telecom, to banking, to healthcare, and so on. Most major industries are filled with some variation of massive corporations protected from competition by the government.
With Cisco they have a head start on quality or at least the perception of quality, their products are tried and tested. There is also brand value, Cisco is the real deal, it looks dead posh in the rack for 'nobody got sacked for buying IBM' reasons. They also have supply chain advantages, e.g. a dealer network and short lead times for those dealers to get out of stock items. There is also the matter of warranty/returns.
Sure, another company can put together the customer service aspect, however, manufacturing is a very small part of the retail price of a product and it is normally the wider customer service aspects plus brand identity (which includes advertising/marketing) that makes a product succeed in the marketplace.
See Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang.
Also, so somebody else will help pay for all of the Superchargers they want to build.
Copyright protection is all you need in the software space to differentiate from your competitors, because in software development the execution is a lot more important than the idea. Well executed versions of old ideas can blow away the competition. See e.g. the iphone, which did less than earlier smartphones, but did it much better. Note also that it wasn't the patents that prevented competitors from catching up, because they ended up ignoring them anyway and still took half a decade to make a competing product despite having access to the same hardware from the beginning.